innumerable woes which were about to
affect almost every one of us, have thrown upon us more plainly, from
the recesses of those days in which it was making ready, its menacing
shadow. One would think that it ought to have overcast the whole
horizon of the future, even as it will overcast the whole horizon of
the past. A secret of such weight, suspended in time, ought surely to
have weighed upon all our lives; and presentiments or revelations
should have arisen on every hand. There was none of these. We lived
and moved without uneasiness beneath the disaster which, from year to
year, from day to day, from hour to hour, was descending upon the
world; and we perceived it only when it touched our heads. True, it
was more or less foreseen by our reason; but our reason hardly
believed in it; and besides I am not for the moment speaking of the
inductions of the understanding, which are always uncertain and which
are resigned beforehand to the capricious contradictions which they
are accustomed daily to receive from facts.

2

But I repeat, beside or above these inductions of our everyday logic,
in the less familiar domain of supernatural intuitions, of divination,
prediction or prophecy properly so-called, we find that there was
practically nothing to warn us of the vast peril. This does not mean
that there was any lack of predictions or prophecies collected after
the event; these number, it appears, no fewer than eighty-three; but
none of them, excepting those of Leon Sonrel and the Rector of Ars,
which we will examine in a moment, is worthy of serious discussion. I
shall therefore mention, by way of a reminder, only the most widely
known; and, first of all, the famous prophecy of Mayence or Strasburg,
which is supposed to have been discovered by a certain Jecker in an
ancient convent founded near Mayence by St. Hildegard, of which the
original text could not be found and of which no one until lately had
ever heard. Then there is another prophecy of Mayence or Fiensberg,
published in the _Neue Metaphysische Rundschau_ of Berlin in February,
1912, in which the end of the German Empire is announced for the year
1913. Next, we have various predictions uttered by Mme. de Thebes, by
Dom Bosco, by the Blessed Andrew Bobola, by Korzenicki, the Polish
monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann and so on, which are even less
interesting; and lastly the prophecy of "Brother Johannes," published
by M. Josephin Peladan in the _Figaro_ of